PRK eye surgery - My experience so far

[Grimlock]

Last Friday I underwent PRK laser eye corrective surgery.  Basically I got my eyes blasted by a laser in hopes of improving my fairly poor vision (astigmatism).  It was a pretty wild experience, totalling maybe 15 to 20 minutes.  Before the surgery they gave me breakfast in the form of a Valium pill to calm the nerves which I gratefully accepted.  After about 15 to 20 minutes they took me into the surgery room.  There were about 5 people in there including the doctor.  They layed me on a flat table that was positioned between two machines.  The doc said a few things and put some numbing drops in my eyes followed by some sort of instrument that blurred my vision.  The next thing I knew the table was rotating to one side and positioned me under one of the machines.  A portion of the machine extended out and pushed onto my right eye with fairly significant pressure (apparently this is when the outer layer of the eye tissue is extracted).  The same procedure was done immediately after.  Next the table rotated back between the two machines where the doctor began scraping and removing any residual tissue from my eyes. At this time you can imagine my eyes were fairly blurry, even so I could make out the tools as he was cleaning my eyes.   Once cleaned the table rotated to to other direction.  The doctor then told me he was going to remove my astigmatism and to stare at the blinking light.  Next thing I knew it sounded like a big bug zapper in a rapid rhythmic pattern.  I could smell a burning smell similar to burning hair (yea I know what burning eyeball smells like now).  After about 30 seconds they shut it down, poured liquid over my eye presumably to cool it down and clean it.  They put some more drops in my eye and put a clear bandage contact.  They ran the bug zapper on the other eye, put the bandage on it and that was it.  They gave me some fancy looking goggles to wear to protect my eyes and sent me home to take a nap to kick start the healing process.

A lot of people have a pretty rough time during the first few days of PRK.  The only pain I had was after I woke up from my nap on the first day.  It was similar to an amplified feeling of having soap in your eye.

So far I'm pretty happy with the results, I have 20/20 but everything is still pretty hazy during the healing process.  My eye's are pretty dry too which is expected.  I was anticipating a fairly rough ride for the first 2 weeks based on the experience of others...

Anyway that's my fairly detailed account of having PRK, maybe some of you have considered it in the past or will have the opportunity to consider it in the future, most go with Lasik due to the easy recovery but PRK has some long term advantages over Lasik.

[Quietus]

Cool.  I've thought about having eye surgery a few times.  There's obviously the financial hurdle, but apart from that, it always sounds odd that you can go from having naff eyesight to 20/20 in a few minutes. :^_^: